The Rhine

The Rhine is a major transport artery, 766 miles long, and its waters sustain lots of boats and wildlife. Grand cities, including Düsseldorf, Cologne, Bonn and even Strasbourg, on the eastern tip of France, hang close to the river. There are also beautiful little riverside settlements along the way, which typify what people mean when they talk about the beauty of rural Germany.

This sense of the rural is accentuated by the numerous vineyards peppered along the Rhine valley. On most cruises, you can stop along the way and visit a vineyard or two, tasting their wines and trying the local food — which is about as authentic a German experience as you can get.

The best bit of the Rhine is undoubtedly the UNESCO-registered section between Koblenz and Rüdesheim, where the steep valley walls are topped with forest and dotted with crag-topping castles and half-timbered towns, each of which has its own river landing.

The Main

The Main isn’t as big as the Rhine, but at 327 miles it is still huge when compared to many other European rivers. Where the Rhine flows from south to north, the Main flows from east to west, through the heart of Germany. And it intersects with the Rhine near Frankfurt, just upstream of the latter’s UNESCO-registered section mentioned above.

Idyllic castles and countryside provide the gorgeous backdrop to a Main river cruise. Most routes pass through Frankfurt, allowing you the opportunity to spend some time in this vibrant city, but also to see it from afar. Its beautiful skyline has earned it the nickname ‘Mainhattan’, as it has some of the most impressively tall and elegant buildings in Europe.

There are also vineyards along the Main, so a comprehensive German wine tour of the Rhine and the Main might be on the cards for the die-hard wine enthusiasts.

There’s a Mediterranean flavour to the former capital of Bavaria. Could it be the tall narrow streets of Regensburg’s old city, which could easy have been transported from Nice to give shade from the midday sun? Or the plazas and piazzas surrounded by ice-cream parlours, which could so easily be somewhere on the Italian Riviera? Or even the robed Dominican, Benedictine or Carmelite figures fluttering down cobbled alleys, reminiscent of Rome’s Vatican city?

In fact Regensburg was once the seat of the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire, an empire which – despite the name – was much more to do with central Europe than it was with Rome. It was the power base for Emperor Charlemagne, and it remains essentially medieval in its layout. The city has 1,400 buildings of serious historical significance still standing, many of them more than 500 years old. The Porta Praetoria, one of the original Roman gates, is over 2,000 years old.

The best place to get a snapshot of this epoch-straddling place is out on the Steinerne Brücke, a magnificent bridge built back in 1130 and which for many centuries was the only Danube river-crossing between Ulm and Vienna. That bridge played a huge role in Regensburg’s growth, giving it unprecedented historical importance in trade, religion and politics. It remains a hefty piece of stonework, and from its centre, pedestrians can look back at a medieval skyline studded with towers, with the soft yellows and ochres of old walls producing a fading fresco on the riverbank.

Salt and sausages

A lot of those riverside buildings were originally storehouses for river-borne cargo, particularly salt, and all this trade imbued the city with a cosmopolitan spirit. The key salt-trading building, the Salzstadel right by the Steinerne Brücke, is this year hosting a new visitor centre marking five years since the city became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Also down by the waterside, just along from the bridge, is what is supposedly the oldest restaurant in Germany. The Sausage Kitchen is a low stone cottage with a tall chimney, unmissable not because of its architecture – it looks like a Greek quayside taverna – but because of the all-pervasive smell of grilling Wurst, which are still homemade. Its customers are in good company, for Goethe, Mozart and Haydn all ate here.

Today Regensburg continues to produce its celebrities. The recently-retired Pope was mere Cardinal Ratzinger during his formative years as a professor at the university, and would have been a regular presence in Regensburg’s impressive Cathedral.

So also has been Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, one of the most controversial of Germany’s aristocrats. She still lives in part of the Thurn and Taxis Palace, a former monastery close to the heart of the city. The palace is almost a town in itself, with the outlying areas given over to museums, galleries, a brewery and restaurants. Between them its 500 rooms amass 14,000 sq metres of parquet flooring, several Gobelin tapestries and a crystal chandelier which weighs more than a ton. Every July the palace hosts a major arts festival, the Thurn und Taxis Schlossfestspiele, with concerts, opera, musicals and fireworks in the courtyards.

But despite the size and the grandeur of their home the Thurn und Taxis family does not have an immensely long tradition in Germany. They were originally Italians, which somehow seems appropriate for Regensburg.

German bread is the greatest thing since, well … sliced bread! The country boasts more than 3,000 different varieties of the stuff, far more than any other country in the world. Whether white, grey or black, made with pumpkin or with sunflower seeds, whether bread roll or pretzl –  it doesn’t just fill the stomach, it’s a work of art and an intrinsic part of German culture. And despite the onslaught of supermarkets, huge numbers of villages still have their own bakery.

This vast offer is partly down to Germany’s varied climate, which allows wheat, rye, barley and oats but also buckwheat, maize or millet and potatoes to thrive. All are used as the basis for dough.

But history and geography were equally important to diversity, as the small princedoms of the olden days sought to carve out their own identity with individual coins… and bread varieties. In true German fashion, the bakers huddled together in guilds and passed their craft on from generation to generation. Today, most regions still have their own local speciality, such as the Westphalian Pumpernickel, Bavarian Pretzl or Oldenburger Brot, a wholemeal bread made of rye. And German bakers and patissiers are found in big cities and hotels all over the world.

If we really needed proof that Germans know which side their bread (brot) is buttered we’d find it in expressions such as Abendbrot (supper), Brötchengeber (employer) or Brotneid (envy) and also in valued institutions such as the Museum of Bread and Art in Ulm. In the fact that the star puppet of German children’s TV channel KI.KA is ‘Bernd, das Brot’ – a slice of talking bread. Or the “Day of the Bread” on 5th May when the Bread Ambassador (2014: celebrity chef Tim Mälzer) promotes the benefits of bread throughout the country.

In fact, it is of such importance to the nation that German bakers are now calling for it to be recognised by UNESCO as part of the “intangible cultural heritage”, just like the Argentian tango or Chinese acupuncture.

For much of its length the river Rhine is a big and nondescript waterway, responsible for draining much of Switzerland, Austria and Germany and carrying one helluva lot of freight en route. But for a comparatively short piece of its 1,233km journey from source to sea, it achieves true celebrity status as it cuts through the 260 metre deep Rhine gorge, creating some of the finest scenery in western Europe, to which mankind has added handsome towns, quirky watchtowers and towering castles. These features, together with the slings and arrows of history that went into creating them, has led to the whole gorge being listed as a site of world heritage by UNESCO. And that’s without even mentioning the wine; the gorge’s south-facing shores are slathered in some of the most productive vineyards in Europe.

The gorge has been inspirational for poets, painters and composers (Brahms, Wagner, Goethe) for several centuries – and buttock-clenching for ship’s captains for even longer. The artistically-inclined appreciate the contrast between the beautifully manicured layers of vines and the indomitable wildness of the water, which surges white-flecked through the gorge with a force that all but defeats the most resolute of marine diesels; a skipper needs special certification to tackle these waters.

The most spectacular stretch starts at Rudesheim (Bingen) in the south (frequent trains run from Frankfurt airport via Wiesbaden and take 75 minutes) and runs almost due north for around 65kms to Koblenz. For all of this distance – in fact all the way from Wiesbaden to Koblenz – a distance of 108kms, there are no bridges. Accordingly river transport is key, both in terms of cross-river ferries, and in long distance cruisers, some of them hotel boats savouring the scenery with leisurely stops and others of them day cruisers providing a regular scheduled service.

Three different approaches

For visitors there are three main choices of activity. For walkers, the Rheinsteig is one of Europe’s greatest long distance footpaths, and it follows the river on the east bank (the vineyard side) mostly in the state of Hesse. It sometimes dips down into towns, but much of the time it stays high, staying in shaded woodland of oak and birch, offering terrific views of the river below.

For cyclists, the west bank has the dedicated cycle path, down at river level, sometimes along the side of the road, sometimes doing its own thing at the water’s edge. It is impossible to get lost, and the river’s regular boats – or the trains, which serve both sides – are always at hand to return you to base if you don’t want to retrace your steps.

And then there are all the boat passengers, on day trips or on sleek, glittering hotel boats, sunning themselves in the gorge’s microclimate between stops at the key towns. These are Rudesheim, Bingen, Bacharach, Oberwesel, St Goar, Bad Salzig and Boppard, and they are usually linear in layout, with a castle above, with tower-encrusted walls, and collections of gabled and half timbered medieval houses, boasting plenty of places to sample the Riesling or the coffee and cake.

Elsewhere, the Rhine gorge remains pretty thinly populated, despite sitting at the heart of Europe’s most populous nation. Only wine-makers’ mansions break the patterns of vineyards, their tractors combing the slopes, and holding back rampant forest.

All in all it is a lovely place to pass a handful of days.

There’s no over-arching official website that covers the whole thing, but the Romantic Rhine is the best general site, and the Rheingau covers the wine-rich destinations at the southern and eastern end.